Actually, that's exactly what outsourcing is. You buy a well-known commodity service off the shelf from a provider that has the scale to maintain real expertise

Actually, that's exactly what outsourcing is. You buy a well-known commodity service off the shelf from a provider that has the scale to maintain real expertise and reap significant economies of scale. It's been done that way for physical products forever (you never see a company with an in-house carpentry shop making it's own office furniture). It's the "replace an in-house team with a broadly equivalent external team" version of outsourcing of recent years that's the bastard.